Where does the ugliness of spirit come from today?

BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

A couple of weeks ago a friend called me, upset over a contretemps she had with two of her oldest friends.

The incident occurred at a favorite lunch spot, where the ladies had dined regularly. A stray remark by one friend led to a vitriolic, curse-filled invective by the other. The tirade was peevish, unanticipated and appalling to my friend. Days later, she found herself still shaken by the incident and began to wonder if the rant may have derived from her friend’s bipolar disorder.

How much bad behavior, she wanted to know, can be attributable to a mental illness, and how much can be ascribed to just plain nastiness?

It’s a good question and one that I lack the credentials to answer. But it’s hardly a new riddle, and one we are finding increasing relevant in a society that seems unhinged by vitriol, violence and dehumanization. A simple question – does my friend’s coarseness come from her illness or from her own well of malice – is a similar puzzle, writ large, we try to solve in the wake of improbable violence.

Where does ugliness of spirit come from?

In the last two weeks, the country has been battered by unfathomable violence as vile as it is baffling. Worshippers praying for grace on a Sunday morning massacred in their pews. A gunman turns a hotel room into an arsenal and slaughters strangers at an outdoor concert. An ISIS-inspired zealot in a rented van plows through a crowd of pedestrians.

In a parallel of a different sort of aggression, all sorts of predatory miscreants from Hollywood and the media turn up in the headlines as prowlers and perverts, forcing themselves on the powerless and claiming innocence by reason of emotional deficit. “I’m innocent because the culture twisted me.” ” I’m innocent because I have been unable to tame my anarchic psyche.” “I’m probably guilty, but I was too drunk to know better.”

The problem with these excuses is that they try to neutralize our disgust. Rather than squaring up to moral deficiencies, they cite emotional ones. “It wasn’t me; it was my demons. Don’t condemn me; counsel me.”

We search for answers for iniquitous behavior everywhere – the recesses of a perpetrator’s psyche, an accounting of their childhood afflictions, even in the tissue of their brains.

Today, at Stanford University Medical Center, neuropathologists are examining the brain of Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 concertgoers in Las Vegas in October without any apparent motive. Paddock cleaned out his computer hard drive before the attack; his diseased brain appears all we have left to examine.

Perhaps by putting the fibers of that brain under the microscope, we might pinpoint one of any number of neurological diseases that would incite such barbarity.

So maybe malice roots itself in brain tissue. Or maybe it’s the result of some dormant mental disorder, bad parenting or schoolyard bullying. Somehow we think if we can isolate a cause, we can cure it.

But we haven’t cured it. We haven’t even come close. The great advances of the 20th century – in medicine and psychology – have let us down.

In the end, all we have is the act. All that is left are dead concertgoers or tourists, corpses littered on a church floor; victimized men and women and damaged relationships. Understanding the perpetrator seems so much less urgent than consoling the victimized.

We can all point to a myriad benighted pasts or emotional vulnerabilities to excuse incivility, predation or mass slaughter. But ultimately our actions stand for themselves.

Today, we can put a human being inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and see what regions of the brain light up when we feel joy. Or despair. Or even fear.

But are we any closer to understanding the human soul than we were at the time of the Greeks? Do we even speak of the soul, outside of yoga class or mindfulness retreats?

Hannah Arendt, who coined the term “the banality of evil,” believed that radical evil involves seeing other human beings as superfluous. I’d go further. The perpetrators of cruelty have taken lives, inflicted lasting wounds and wrought carnage. All of them, whether sexual predators or terrorists, have objectified the other. Other human beings become not souls unto themselves, but pawns in a geopolitical struggle or instruments of pleasure for the powerful. They have desecrated and nullified the concept of soul.

Any time we annihilate the soul – whether our own or another’s – evil roots like a mold. In today’s divisive civil climate, where we are captive to our own echo chambers, the potential for dis-ensouling the others increases. It doesn’t always begin with a semi-automatic weapon. Sometimes, it starts with a mean-spirited remark, which has a destructive power all its own.